Bart Becks' blog.
Being active at the cross-roads of media, technology and consumer electronices, Bart Becks writes about his experiences & believes about the internet, digital media, entrapreneurialism, and offers a view into his personal life, learning

Archieven

Populaire tags

Bart Becks ?

Bart Becks, 13-01-1972 (Bilzen, Belgium). Married with my Femke.
Father of little Charlie B. Becks. Love them both with all my
heart. Previously Senior Vice President New Media of
SBS/ProSiebenSat1, CEO of Belgacom Skynet and President&CEO of
Skynet iMotion Activities. Studied quite some stuff, but mostly
adored my time in New York.

Welcome.

Hey all. You're on the Becks' blog. Nothing about the beer nor the
footballer, just me. All opinions and thoughts are mine personally,
not from any other organisation. Blog on, bart

Categorieën

13-02-05

Bloglines - Search engines - Mediacenter

Hey,

this week I attended a conference of Mediacenter: the intersection between media, technology and society. Although I left with the passing away of a friend in mind and couldn't really focus, it turned out to be amongst the best I ever attended. I'll share (part) of what I learned.

Let me start with one of the opening speakers: Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines. For those unfamiliar, Bloglines has today 294,121,726 articlesindexed, with approximately 2 mio users on the US market – resulting in 30 to 50% marketshare of the web-rss readers in the US (depending on source).

Mark had a nice trackrecord: after starting up Diba (sold to Sun), he started ONEList (which was later acquired by Yahoo to become Yahoo’s eGroups).

Weird start.

He was introduced as “Mark Fletcher, CEO & founder of Bloglines”. And he replied: since 30 minutes I’m no longer CEO of Bloglines, I’ve just been acquired by AskJeeves”. Guess they are used to this during these SilliconValley conferences … He explained that he wanted to remain active to further develop bloglines & that Bloglines will operate under own brand, but leverage on development & marketing capacities of AskJeeves.

Underlying principle is interesting: combing a search technology with a blogreader brings high relevance for exact matches. Now that Blogs are being accepted as an acceptable User Generated Content (UGM), it may bring more relevance to AskJeeves.

" Look at this he told me: revenues for 2004 are 261,3 mio$, growth of over 140% compared to 2003". Also earnings results are impressive. It may be the start of AskJeeves getting back on top of our mind ranks. Or it may be the start of a global blogwar …

I’m also a big believer in the power of User-Generated Content, especially towards specialised & local newscoverage. The big brands (cnn, bbc, nbc, fox or locally vrt, vtm, rtbf, rtl, belga, concentra, etc …) have an opportunity to take back/keep the market for online ‘branded’ and fairly generalistic newscoverage (although It’s not done yet if print or tv is better suited in the broadband era), but the amount of content generated by individuals is huge and gets better every day. The only thing is: you must be able to find it. And what do we do to find something ? Yes, use a search engine …

This week-end Skynet surpassed 45.000 Belgian bloggers. After about 18 months of the launch of the Skynet tool, this is becoming an impressive number !And we’re only just at the start of this online mediarevolution !